Expedia TravelAds: best practices & strategies

What is Expedia TravelAds?

TravelAds is a platform that can help hotels to improve their ranking on Expedia and other OTAs affiliated with Expedia. The platform allows to bid for a higher ranking, create customized sponsored listings that stand out from organic OTA listings.

OTA rankings are determined by complex algorithms, prioritizing hotels that deliver the most profit to the OTA - taking rates, discounts, promotions, commission, cancellation rates and reviews into consideration. This system makes it difficult for hotels to improve organically, but TravelAds offers the opportunity to bypass all these and place your property among the top of the search results.

As Expedia is investing enormous funds to grow and secure their market share against Booking.com, dominating it and its affiliates can be one of the best investments hotels can do if they wish to generate additional revenue.

Best practices & strategies

Bidding and optimization might seem to be a complex procedure but focusing on the below objectives will make advertising management on Expedia TravelAds simple and profitable.

1. Create outstanding ad copy

Communicate why travelers should book your hotel. Refrain from generic phrases like "best price" or "discount". They are looking for the best possible experience they can afford so tell them what will await after checking in. Write about the unique features of the hotel, such as pools, treatments, excellent F&B.

2. Choose the best image

Pick an image that will stand out from the rest. Night photos, pool photos, and room shots are performing the best. Make sure to use high-quality images only.

3. Optimise for high ad coverage

Most hotels fail here, as they optimize for ranking. In most cases, going with lower bids will allow you more clicks for less, so your daily budget will last longer. This means more people will see your ads before your budget will be "clicked away". More view equal more clicks and opportunities to get bookings so keep your bids as low as possible to increase ad coverage.

4. Make use of scheduled ads

A brilliant feature of TravelAds is that one can schedule ads based on search date and stay dates. This comes especially handy for festive promotions or boosting demand for low season periods. Custom ad copies can be created for scheduled campaigns so make sure that you use it the best possible way.

Include Christmas photos for festive promotions, use beach or pool photos for summer promotions and create an ad copy that resonates well with the season.

5. Hotel & package bidding

On Expedia TravelAds, it is possible to manage hotel only & package channels separately. Research your destination specific travel trends to understand how people book hotels and flights and optimize your bidding and budget accordingly.

City hotels typically do not benefit from package bidding, while resorts and hotels in holiday destinations are more likely to get additional bookings by bidding on package channels.

Using Expedia TravelAds well can generate amazing additional revenue but keeping it optimized will put your hotel way ahead of the competition. Since it can be managed with budgets as small as $15 / day, there is no reason why not to try it and make it work for your property.

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